Air may be likened to the omnipresent ‘mother’ since the air is spirit, so the world mother is a spirit, the anima mundi.

This talk will explore Jung’s ambivalent attitude toward theanima mundior world soul. For much of his early career, Jung dismissed the idea that the world might have spiritual interiority, as conceived by animist traditions. He was a modern scientist who had inherited the Enlightenment view that the world is devoid of soul, merely physical, and any ‘soul’ that might be found in it was put there by us, through projection or romantic ideation. But as his career progressed, and the philosopher in Jung became more pronounced, the idea of an animated universe began to loom large. This meant that his theory of projection - a mainstay of his psychology - was in crisis. His acceptance of theanima mundiacted as a critical juncture in his career, in which he could no longer maintain the same clinical outlook from which he had started.

David Tacey Emeritus Professor (La Trobe University) is a public intellectual, inter-disciplinary scholar, and former President of the C G Jung Society of Melbourne. David is a specialist in Jungian psychology; his books on Jung include: How to Read Jung; The Jung Reader; Gods and Diseases: Making Sense of our Physical and Mental Wellbeing; and The Darkening Spirit: Jung, Spirituality, Religion. David is published internationally in five languages. His most recent book isBeyond Literal Belief: Religion as Metaphor(GarrattPublishing, Melbourne 2015).